A kind of a "dangerous supplement", marked, scarred on a body, post-orgasmically, always, already in anticipation of (a) crisis OR for a desert avec 'agape'. Mindb(l)ogg(l)ing Noise.
"Avalanche, would you share my last pursuit?" (Baudelaire)

Friday, April 25, 2008

Thursday, April 24, 2008

"What is felt to be dangerous is precisely the seduction contained in the mixture of lack of rigor and grandiose pronouncements. Those who most strongly object to the seductive aspects of Theory would then tend to consider it almost as a pathological phenomenon, but whenever they try to denounce what they see as fake mastery and real mimicry, by a logic which pertains more to hysterical contagion than to sedate intellectual debate, they find themselves failing into ranting denunciations."Jean - Michel Rabate, The Future of Theory, 2002

After a magical anonymity which sets the law in its as if-ness - as with all laws - we begin. It is with the arche and its abilities that one starts, with the abilities of the arche in the beginning of every commentary. The pathology of such a beginning is the pathology of the style of articulate articulations. To articulate the ability of the arche therefore is to dwell upon the prescribed symptoms of a perceived disability to clarify, to clear out, and as such to set, articulately (and) in writing beginnings and middle and ends. Or at least their modes of desired separation au pair with their functions. Not their style, clearly.

It has been demanded, through the necessity of a necessary invocation of ability (not once) to not write employing in writing talk, to not write in tongues that is, in times of urgency, which, critically, are not the exception but the rule. Time and time again the conmentary, beginning here, has commented on them tongues, as if this were The Times. Yet who after all knows were have they been last night? Or the night before? The tongues, not the times. Which lips they parted, time and again, in times of dismantling and definitional disarray, were they have been hiding, where they have been housed? The house is not to be weathered by such tongues, having been build after the tongues' elimination. One could turn back to other tongues and clarify that, but dwelling here on it will not clarify anything. If anything "I simply lay my pathos down on the table, reserving to myself the right to unwrap the package later, depending on the circumstances."

What can a cloud be other than such unraveled exposure though? It is from the beginning that this cloud, patho-logicaly set on the table, which has been revealing itself, not least here. From the arche. One only needs to turn back, go down. To the beginning, here or there. The tongue has always been one of an exposed dis-ability. A form of dyslexia you might say. A techno-logical disanexia more like it with a whiff of anticipation. Anticipation of avalanching commentary as it snowballs, in tongues, post-orgasmically, always, already. Is this then a mirroring, a representation of its own? What are you looking at? Inscribed representations? After all Theory misses out. Misses out on the real, clearly. And even in such uncontainable histrionics it is this desire that is expressed: the yearning for a comfortable dwelling. A house not missing anything as such, but one with no nooks and crannies. A house were every nook and cranny has been polished clean, crystal clear and sharp. As a bullet.

Such politics are really about biting the dusty bullet. Not long ago surgery was performed on hysterics, the shell-shocked and the poilus (if they ever were different). An editing of sorts. A clearing as one does during these days with houses. What has trespassed, what crossed the porous seals of doors and windows is cleared out. And the outside is also cleared too. The modernist discomfort with comfort is well documented. Try the reverse cow-girl on a Rietveld chair or go all doggie-style on the LC4 if you will not take my word for it. Within that discomfort an analogous to the anti-weathering delineations of writing geography can be traced. Across white walls and double-glazed windows which pretend to clearly demarcate the house that one lives in and what hysterically goes on outside. As with these houses, it was not a matter of style, not least for style as it has treacled down, but of function. Of a form that would follow function. Nothing would just simply animate itself - no sir! - there are techniques to be mastered, machines to be lived in. The minimalism of bare essentials, of simply unpacked objects, just another code-word for the discomfort with, admittedly, scatty, dust-prone, that is opaque and iffy, accommodating hysteria of traces, memories, quotes; tongues.

It is not of course, not only, about the course of possessions from accumulation to flaunting. The question of style, of the arche of the beginning of every comment within the remits of a knowingly insufficient, dis-able, Theory, long after the Althusserian separation by strangulation, is a question of the quest of criticality. The reciprocal seduction has to at some point involve tongues. Such an assemblages of tongues is nothing but a body language which puts into productive disjunction the bodies of mastery, re-mastering in mixing the cards and the questions into a self-conscious witnessing, a voyeurism if you prefer, but one across a car park, improper and thus neither of propriety nor of property - as the house is becoming architecture- an excited witnessing, agape. And we are all aware of how difficult it is to even start to make a swift, uncomplicated exit with your pants down to your knees in such situations.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

In the great manner of talking about architecture through its representations, the above representation of a mirroring, as found on youtube, carries on talking about architecture's representations. Following the Improv Everywhere's initial Grand Central partial and hoaxical halting of traffic and the subsequent extended celebrations of slowness, Freeze at Ledras brought together a few tenths of people who had "synchronise[d] their watches in a co-ordination meeting beforehand" and "at exactly the same time ... [did] freeze for 5 minutes". The Freeze at Ledras' aimed residue, as stated on the dedicated facebook event wall, was to initiate a "silent commentary" on the perceived "frozen" state of the 70 or so meters of Ledra street recently opened to civilian traffic. Yet as stated in the video documentation, it claims to be an a-political act (gesture, tactic, event - choose your terminology), while at the same time being "a celebration of the newfound mobility in this particular space and a hope for a greater mobility in the future."

The reference to "silent commentary" can only be seen as an endearing to its authors word-play. Since nothing can be more naive to uncritically locate the body outside the deafening, over-determining hubbub of urban configurations, such as the street, and claim it to be 'silent'. The extremely well defined postures of the freeze participants are anything but silent, in absentia murmurs; they are loud and clear utterances, cries, screams, short-circuiting the conventional structures of communication exchange and of economistic, self-centered circulation. Utopic, momentary and problematic in their relation at least to perceptions of time, but anything but silent. The uncritical engagement of the Ledras' freeze with itself however does not stop at the mere wording of its aims. In both text and video the inability to critically survey the frameworks of event this 70m of geography is evident. No one can argue with the re-newed understanding of the concept and practise of mobilty within and through Ledras street. Nor can hopes for differencing the perception and re-presentation of Nicosia, Ledras or the 'Cyprus Problem' be overlooked. But only a disengaged observer, one locked within dogmatic socio-centric readings of the city can describe the so-called 'dead zone's' state pre-3 April 2008 as frozen. Contraband, civilian and military verbal and scopic exchange, fly-tipping, tourist excursions, UN drive-by administration, the aura of materials and buildings, non-anthropomorphic life, grid and sewage sevices - all these are eliminated from Freeze in Ledras' understanding of Ledras - which in turn is the act's reason d' etre - for the sake probably of a belonging to a movement, albeit of 'freeze-frame'.

What really though sends shivers down one's spine is the stated negation of politics within the contexts of commenting urban space is also telling of the perceived representations and receptions of the city of Nicosia. Nicosia: the non-polis. The greek term for it - Chora - echoes of receptacles after all, welcoming receptacles of foundational conceptions, of mythical pre-linguistic positions, where manifestations are nurtured but which as a space is resistant to its reduction to any such manifestations' appropriations. The tradition of immigrant songs across the globe - from Irish ballads about London to 1930's post-rembetika structures of Athenian civic engagement and pride and from Kazantzides to the No Wave New York sound - stand as proof to this awareness re the traces of the city as both, and at once nurturing and alienating. The spatial term chora also denotes the area surrounding a polis: the bucolic countryside, the sub-urban. What is not civic, not part of the city. When it comes to especially Nicosia's walled city, this is the chora that seems to underscore its readings and shape its representations. Its imagined biography, as time goes by, is one of romanticised nature-prone facades, stone(d) remains, Berlinesque futures -where cultural capital will pave the way for economic regeneration - and sexual deviance of ever-changing origins, reflecting a mirroring of desires and apprehensions, external positions, rather than a participatory if fleeting grasping of the plethora of Nicosia's particulars.

Freeze at Ledras even though it might have wanted to bring at a productive crisis Nicosia's understanding of Nicosia, has stayed stale and stalled in its mirroring of the dominant symbolic a -political discourses surrounding the city of Nicosia. Devoid of the humorous context of other freeze acts, which together with the reconfiguration of the modalities (or agencies) of individuation appears to be Improv Evrywhere's motive and objective, Freeze at Ledras thus remained another mundane reproduction of an essentially cultural act, akin to a vast proportion of the Cypriot cultural production, unable to critically contextualise and comprehend its methods and output in relation not only to its immediate environments but also towards its international outlook and responsibilities. As such it might have been more productive for the desired debate on the pasts and futures of Nicosia via Ledras street, if its muted attempts to 'silently' comment on political matters were to remain for ever silent.

"Just so stylled with the nattes are their flowerheads now an each of all has a lovestalk onto herself and the tot of all the tits of their understamens is as open as he can posably she and is tournesoled straightcut or sidewaist, accourdant to the coursets of things feminite, towooerds him in heliolatry, so they may catchcup in their calyzettes, alls they go troping, those parryshoots from his muscalone pistil, for he can eyespy through them, to thei selfcolours, nevertheleast their tissue peepers, (meaning Mullabury mesh, the time of appling flowers, a guarded figure of speech, a variety of perfume, a bridawl, seamist inso one) as leichty as see saw (O my goodmiss! O my greatmess! O my priselestly preshoes!) while, dewyfully as dimb dumbelles, all alisten to his elixir. Lovelyt!"James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 236.33 - 237.09

"The ideal form is still a contingent norm, but one whose contingency has been rendered necessary, a form of reification with stark consequences for gendered life. Those who disagree with me tend to claim, with some exasperation, 'But it is the law!' But what is the status of such an utterance? "It is the law!" becomes the utterance that performatively attributes the very force t the law that the law itself is said to exercise. "It is the law" is thus a sign of allegiance to the law, a sign of desire for the law to be the indisputable law (...) The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically,a s the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy! Or is it? And to accept such a law as a final arbiter of kinship life? Is that not to resolve by theological means the concrete dilemmas of human sexual arrangements that have no ultimate normative form?"Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim, p. 21